How to Photograph WildlifeRick Sheremeta heads out on the trails of northern Montana to capture indigenous animals with his Tamron SP 70-300mm VC USD lens. |
Article by Jenn Gidman Images by Rick Sheremeta |
Rick Sheremeta and his wife, Dody, have the perfect vantage point for photographing wildlife. There's no shortage of bears, moose, birds, and other indigenous animals in the northwestern Montana region Rick calls home, especially in nearby Glacier National Park. With his Tamron SP 70-300mm VC USD lens, Rick is able to spend long days out on the trails and come back with a memory card full of amazing images. |
"This past summer, we put in more than 200 miles in Glacier Park - that's a lot of hiking!" he says. "For me, the lighter, the better. The 70-300 is a very light lens with a great focal-length range. I can shoot wildlife and also do some landscape and scenic shooting with it: If it's the only lens I've got on hand, I use it in lieu of a wide-angle lens. I just shoot a number of frames, then stitch them together to wield an effectively wider-angle shot." |
Rick leaves the 70-300's Vibration Compensation (VC) feature on whenever he's on the hunt for wildlife. "I put it on and leave it on," he says. "I usually don't carry a tripod, unless I know my destination is a waterfall (where I'd need it to shoot extra steady at 1/4 second or slower to give a silky effect to the flowing water by blurring the motion while keeping everything else tack sharp), so using the VC helps, especially when I'm shooting at a relatively slow shutter speed." |
Read on for Rick's tips on composition, exposure, and keeping yourself (and the animals) out of harm's way. |
Put safety first when photographing wildlife. |
Adjust your settings in advance. |
Adjust exposure for snow-filled scenes. |
I usually shoot wildlife one of two ways: using spot metering or (especially for winter scenes, when the white dominates the exposure) evaluative/matrix metering. For this shot of Maggie, I could have metered on Maggie and just kept my exposure compensation at zero, but since I was shooting a lot of other things that day that also had snow in the background (which I knew would dominate the exposure), I just kept the metering on "Evaluative." I set the exposure compensation to +1, which I almost always do when shooting in snow, and when I brought it into Lightroom, I brought the exposure up almost another full stop. Now, I could have just set my exposure compensation to +2 (and if it's a bright winter day, I'll do that). But on overcast days like this one, I'll start at +1 and see how things go from there. |
Focus on the eyes. |
I tried to get that same catchlight when I spotted a hoary marmot, a type of large ground squirrel that lives in Glacier National Park. We had just finished our hike on the Ptarmigin Trail and were having lunch when I spotted this little guy scurrying around the rocks. They're not really spooked by humans, so I was able to focus on his eyes and patiently wait till I could get that nice catchlight. |
Capture animals in motion. |
You have to shoot at an extremely high shutter speed to capture a hummingbird. I shot this at 1/2000th of a second (you can see there's still some blur in motion in the wings) and in Shutter Priority, because I wanted to maintain that shutter speed. I wasn't concerned with depth-of-field because I was zoomed in so tight. |
In this case, I was shooting in Shutter Priority and had the camera metering set for spot metering. Knowing that the bird was much brighter than the dark woods background, I set the exposure compensation to +1. If I had not done this, the background would have been very light and the bird totally blown out. That exposure maintained the darkness of the background. Then, when I brought it into Lightroom, I brought the exposure down about 2/3 stop, just to provide a little more contrast between the hummingbird and background. I could have left it alone and it would still have been OK - just some artistic license on my part. |
Show animals against the landscape for environmental imagery. |
Look for fleeting moments that allow you more compositional creativity. |
To see more of Rick Sheremeta's images, go to www.alpenglowproductions.com. |